Rocking Horse Winner / A Fragment of Stained Glass

The opening words sound like a fairy story:
“There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck.”
But it is immediately clear that this is more Grimm than Disney:
“She married for love, and the love turned to dust. She had bonny children, yet she felt they had been thrust upon her, and she could not love them.”

It was intended to be a ghost story, but there are no ghosts - just supernatural voices and premonitions, and the metaphorical ghost of an off-stage, useless father:
“Though he had good prospects, those prospects never materialised.”

It is as haunting as any ghost story because of the combined effects of lack of love and whispering walls on the boy, Paul:
“The house became show more haunted by the unspoken phrase: There must be more money!’”

The heart of the story is luck, money, and the absence of both.
The heart of Paul longs for love from the empty heart of his mother.

Image: The word “Lucky” with horseshoe U (Source)

Luck

Paul asks why they don’t have a car. His mother says it’s because they’re poor (this is relative - they have a large house and several servants, but live beyond their means).
When he asks why, she says, “slowly and bitterly, ‘it’s because your father has no luck.’” She fails to mention her own compulsive spending.
“Is luck money, mother?”
“No, Paul! Not quite. It’s what causes you to have money… That’s why it’s better to be born lucky than rich.”

So does dying rich mean dying lucky (or just that you have a bad accountant?!)? Tragedy or triumph?

Make your own luck?

The idea of making your own luck is a cliché. But if you “make” it, surely it’s skill, effort, and persistence, rather than luck?

Rationalists like me can’t manufacture luck and can’t hope for Paul’s paranormal solution.

That leaves us with a delicate balancing act: to accept and enjoy what we have right now, even as we reach out and up, striving for more and better lives, more and better selves.

More importantly, sacrificial love is more honourable than materialistic greed.

Image: Mother and Paul’s shadow, from a screen adaptation - Valerie Hobson in 1949, I think (Source)

On the psychiatrist’s couch

Like Oedipus, and like the son in Sons and Lovers, Paul wants to replace his feckless father in the cold heart of his mother. His furious rocking may bring pleasure and relief beyond what's explicit in the story.

But the ending... That's the horror.

Ad astra

As a child, I named my own rocking horse Pegasus because I knew he had wings. Their invisibility was part - confirmation, even - of their magic. Like Paul, my riding was sometimes frantic, mesmeric, dangerous. Pegasus flew me to many and wondrous places. I won no money, but I lived to tell the tales and to see my own, loved, child ride Pegasus as I had done. I saw my own Winner’s Enclosure.

See also

• I’ve reviewed several of DHL’s short stories HERE. Many of them have themes that overlap with those here.

• See Sons and Lovers, which I reviewed HERE, for another Lawrencian Paul with a probably Oedipal complex.

• This sort of ghostless ghost story reminded me a little of Poe. See my reviews of:
- The Pit and the Pendulum
- The Tell-Tale Heart
- The Fall of the House of Usher

• There are several screen adaptations, but I’ve not watched any of them.

Short story club

I reread this as one of the stories in The Art of the Short Story, by Dana Gioia, from which I'm aiming to read one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 2 May 2022. I reread it again in The Short Story Club's second anthology, Black Water: The Anthology of Fantastic Literature, by Alberto Manguel.

You can read this story here.

You can join the group here. show less

this one rocks! then again, I am back and forth on it. In the looking glass, “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” I would say this applies superbly to monetary status and greed. The only remaining question is what becomes of the horse . . .

I must have been around 12 when I read this story and I remember it blowing my mind. I have not read it since, and while knowing practically nothing about psychology then, even though as an adult I went into social work, it is a great story with some psy elements and a certain 'creepiness ' about it. Time to re-discover it after over 40 years.

A

I 'read' this on audio. I'm getting used to the medium and can see that the acting ability of the narrator is what makes all the difference. More difference that the actual text written by the author. This narrator, a woman, chose to give the little boy a thin, reedy voice, almost laughable, but written, I could see that this had considerably greater depth.

No matter what I read and hear, I have to say that still to me listening to an audio book is entirely synonymous to listening to a radio play and in no way has the depth of a written book - after all th e characterisation and emphasis have all been taken out of my hands and, like with a film, its someone else's interpretation that is feeding my brain.

Classic short story that I pulled up online and read. So far, it's the only thing by Lawrence that I actually like. :-)

“The Rocking Horse Winner” is a story about a middle-aged woman with no “luck” who has a habit of spending more than her husband is willing to make. She worries constantly about money, so much so that her son, Paul, begins to get involved with horse betting with the gardener, Bassett. He tells his Uncle Oscar about it and gives his mother 5000 pounds to spend. Disappointed when she demands more money, he tries harder to pull in a large income to support her. At the end, it is revealed that Paul rocks on his rocking horse until he reaches a clairvoyant state that allows him to see the name of the winning horse. Shortly after learning this fact, his mother watches him die.